A shame some company cant produce a radio like the ADAT transceiver for the mass amateur radio market. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a ham radio company with the engineering expertise of ADAT that produce such a radio. I dont really know why the ADAT company has kept such a low marketing profile especially in such an important market like the USA. Its really too understand why are not very active marketing their product. Once you use an ADAT radio you soon appreciate the virtues of putting a SDR radio into a stand alone box. If a company like Icom produced a radio like the ADAT transceiver it would be a runaway success.

The ham radio transceiver manufacturers are very bad at doing basic market research, they are not very proactive at exploiting the hot button issues in the ham radio market for new products. All we seem to get is same old crap.Every year the release of more radio models with useless features that nobody needs, the performance deficit is glaringly obvious.

There is so much more that could be offered if they tried. The feeling that I get is that the ham radio business is at the end of its product life cycle. Its about too die and blow away because of technology obsolescence. The newaffordable SDR market is making life difficult for manufacturers. However if they grabbed the bull by the horns and start delivering advanced technology features hams will buy these new products rather than the stale bread that they offer year after year.

You are prone to attacking Flex a lot of the time but most of what you say above is true and it's the "big three" that are the most guilty. That's why a company like Flex was such a breath of fresh air. There is fault to be found with Flex and they probably could produce better radios but what they have produced is still worlds better than the same old crap that the Japanese manufacturers have been selling forever. For years, the Japanese manufacturers have been "laughing all the way to the bank" at the ignorance and gullibility of the average ham operator.73,Michael, W4HIJ

This is not at all surprising and I have seen this many, many times. They (the manufacturers) will buy chips by the boat load to get the price down to pennies per chip and then use the same chips on model after model for as long as possible.

But heck this has been going on in radio and electronics since I got into it in the 1960s. milk as much as they can out of what they currently have.

Copyright 2000-2016 eHam.net, LLC
eHam.net is a community web site for amateur (ham) radio operators around the world.
Contact the site with comments or questions.
WEBMASTER@EHAM.NETSite Privacy Statement